bilingual education

[openoceans]

Hello mums! I'm new to mumsnet, so bare with me if I stumble along the way.

I'm a Canadian living in South Korea and trying to encourage Korean moms to speak English to their children from birth. I've developed a program that allows them to mimic dialogues directly to their babies. I am not encouraging them to use only English, but rather to speak two languages to their babies.

I'm also not encouraging them to diverge from the dialogues. There are strict guidelines and rules in place with this program to ensure that the mothers mimic only what they hear and not ad lib on their own.

I'm looking for your opinions on this issue. Do you think it's plausible to build a strong foundation in a language by having it spoken to you at home by your mom when that language isn't native to her?
I appreciate all of your comments in advance.

Btw, I don't believe that it is bad for the mothers to speak English, even imperfect English with the children. As long as they are getting enough input of the correct pronunciation and grammar. (eg. listening to the CD twice a day)

You got it. That's the point. Thanks for making it clear.

openoceans Fri 22-Jan-10 08:49:25

"But, I also ask whether you think it is plausible for non-native English speaking mothers to use English at home with their children as a way to develop their children's English ability"

Yes, provided they either

a) have sufficient near-native competency to actually speak the language to the child in a creative way and with a good accent

(MIFLAW on this forum is doing this with his dd; if you want research, there was a linguist called Saunders iirc who did it successfully with his dd)

or:

b) have enough technical knowledge of the language to formally teach it to their child once the child is old enough to understand formal instruction

(my mother did this to me; by age 6 I was old enough to understand the English tense system and memorise the irregular verbs; this again was successful but depended entirely on a combination of my maturity and my mother's ability to explain any problems to me as they arose)

It should be noted that if you choose path b, the parent needs to be someone who is actually capable of explaining languages. Also, there is no particular advantage in it being the mother; you could equally well hire a tutor or sign up for a language class. In my case, doing it with my mother was the right thing because she was an excellent teacher and had a very good accent. I never had to unlearn anything that came from her.

I spoke only English to my children, the rest of our family speaks Korean. But, I have always practiced my Korean on my children and my husband speaks to them in both languages.

My program came about as a result of my own difficulty in learning Korean and how I wished I had had the program for myself years earlier.

open - Not that I'm in any way procrastinating but another netiquette 'rule' (possibly peculiar to just the forums I frequent?) is to name a poster if you're thanking them for a point because you're not responding to a specific post, you're responding to a thread in general so we don't necessairly know which post you're replying to and which point you're taking up?

Most people bold by adding a * on either side of the word or italicise using a ^ on either side of the word.

Well, appart from our 3 languages, DS is now learning mandarin in school.
We do not speak it at all but to follow your example we do use a few very limited conversational guidelines to support the teaching at school.
Honestly it has only produced very limited results even though we are in a country where mandarin is a native language.
So whilst it is an interesting avenue to explore, it only produces very very limited results.

Now, as far educating the ear for a language, yes I think you may have a valid point.
DS is awfully good at recognising various languages even though he had a limited exposure to them.
ie: Dutch (we lived there briefly when he was 2/3 years old, portuguese (picked up from his cpoeira teacher), phillipino ( his nanny), Korean (his best friend), urdu ( his other best friend) etc.....

Then again, it might just be that DS has a very musical ear and is just awfully smart

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I agree with cory and others that it will be difficult to get good results like this.

However, I don't think that good accent is that much of a problem. In India they speak very good English but their accent does take a while to tune into. They don't speak with our accent, but they are easily understood, in a similar way to how we understand dialects.

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I don't think that the programme will work - unless the teachers (i.e mothers) have a near native standard of English, and as OP acknowledges that there is nearly no English support outside a study environment, I supect most of them do not speak English to such a level.

The Korean children, you aim to teach, will never become fluent English speakers if taught by Korean mothers, in an environment which does not allow the language to develop. This would probably be the case whatever the programme - for the language to develop there needs to be external stimulus also - the child needs to see the relevance in using the other language.

yes!!!
Relevance in using the other language is key.

There is relevance in using the other language. All Koreans will learn to speak English and a lot of them start formal instruction at an early age. Surely the DC in this study will have a heads up?

Why is teaching children a language any different than teaching them anything else?

True bilingualism seems to be some sort of Holy Grail of language acquisition, involving a complete cultural rebranding.

I am sure that the OP is not trying to achieve this. Thus her academic approach may well be very effective in producing 'fluent' English/Korean conversationalists.

There is relevance 4 years later. But that doesn't provide the children with an incentive to use the language as it's being spoken to them.

I think the 'bilingualism' entered the debate from the thread title which happens to be 'bilingual education'. Had it been 'English language acquisition in infancy' or 'teaching young children English as a minority lanugage' the people reading the thread and responding would have been very different. The term 'bilingual education' is generally accepted to mean education in two languages with the aim of encouraging bilingualism.

And FWIW I don't think bilingualism involves a complete cultural rebranding at all. I still identify myself very strongly as British - the fact I can speak more than one language and hope to become truly bilingual has nothing to do with cultural branding. Culture is important when the language is being handed down as part of a heritage but not when you're leaning a language for the language's sake.

The problems Koreans face in conversation seem to lie with the method of English teaching in schools which the OP is probably not going to be able to do anything about - although if she can then fair play to her! Exposing children to the sounds of English and certain phrases isn't, IMO, going to produce fluent conversationalists and I would want to see longitudinal studies carried out by academics to prove that it was the case.

Interesting perspective the dolly.

re: "cultural rebranding" , surely not a full rebranding but culture IS tremendously important for bilingulism.
Bilingualism is more than fluency. You need culture too to understand the tone, the nuance, the colloquial, the references to popular culture etc....

But I do remain a bit sceptic too.

*dolly, I think you make a good point with:

"Why is teaching children a language any different than teaching them anything else?"

But would you expect somebody to be able to teach their child maths if they didn't understand it themselves but were reduced to reading verbatim from the book? That is the problem with the OPs method, that it involves slavish repetition, not teaching.

I quite agree with you that a mother who has some English should be able to teach it. But then she should be able to teach it in a flexible and creative way, adapted to the needs of the specific child at a specific time. Repeating a set dialogue just doesn't do that.

I quite agree that we shouldn't turn other languages into a holy cow that you are not allowed to touch unless you can anticipitate complete balanced bilingualism. But there are still ways of approaching the cow that are more likely to work than other ways. And I see nothing in the OPs method that differs from just running a tape recorder or, in my nephew's case, a toy dinosaur.

slim I would challenge that. Bilingualism is being almost equally comfortable in two languages and able to think, speak, dream in those languages. You can be bilingual, say, Spanish/English but only know one culture where Spanish is spoken, say Spain, and the colloquial expressions and popular culture there without any knowledge of, say, Mexico. Only knowing one dialect and one culture doesn't stop you being bilingual. Following the same reasoning that language and culture confer bilingualism am I bilingual American/British? I understand the tones, nuances, colloquial language and a lot about popular culture but it's still one language. Language isn't necessarily always to do with culture - the same language can have different cultures and the same culture can have different languages.

Having said that of course you need to know the culture to be bilingual precisely for the expressions and the nuance but it doesn't mean you need to 'rebrand'. That makes it sound like can only have one 'culture', which is an artificial concept anyway, which clearly isn't the case. You adapt to the culture you're in without rebranding and many people are multicultural.

frankin, I don't quite understand the relevance of your examples?
As far as most people are concerned spanish, english or say portuguese, french, bahasa, russian are still ONE language despite the multitude of countries that speak it.

I agree ( and already said so in my post) that full cultural rebranding is not necessary. But you need a cultural anchoring somehow.
I would know that or I'd multiple personality disorder myself!

That was my point - one language is one language without the culture. You don't need to be fluent in all cultures which speak a language to be bilingual in one language so you can be bilingual without being culturally rebranded.

Awareness, yes. Rebranding, no.

we are actually saying the same thing.

I think you two are actually saying the same thing.

The fact that there are several countries sharing one language doesn't mean they are totally separate cultural entities: the English and Americans still have a lot in common that is not shared by say the Koreans or even the Dutch.

I think we are as well. Re-reading my post I come across as targeting slim but I didn't mean to - I meant to say more I would challenge the idea of cultural 'rebranding' so perhaps better rephrased as I would challenge that more strongly.